No Arts without Artists – Bella Caledonia

It’s said that, in August, if you listen quietly in Teviot or on the Mound you can actually hear the sound of money being extracted from Edinburgh. There is a neat symmetry to the announcement a week ago that the Edinburgh Festival would get an additional £25million (‘Arts festival £25m​​​​​​​ funding boost – Angus Robertson‘) – and the announcement of £10m cuts to the arts – and then yesterday the announcement of the closure of Creative Scotland’s individual artists and performers fund.

If you were sending a message to cultural workers based in Scotland this couldn’t be spelled out any clearer. As the festival acts out an orgy of arts and millions of people pour through Edinburgh, locally-based companies will close, theatres shut, venues close their doors, and thousands of individual artists will just give up.

There’s a dark irony to all of this.

The first is that Scotland punches well above its weight in arts and culture. We have writers and directors and performers and poets and filmmakers and actors of the highest quality.

The second is that, in the wider scheme of things, the actual money required is small change.

The third irony is that all of this – all of this could and should be about how you build a small country, through storytelling in film and theatre and tv and literature.

The problem with the constant dangling of the bait for future funding is it will be too late. Angus Robertson has said: “Scottish Government funding, which is committed to raise additional annual spending on culture and the arts by £100m by 2028/29, aiming for an increase of £25m next year.”

By then it will be too late. Artists and performers will have given up. Theatres and cinemas that have closed their doors won’t be re-opened. You lose not just the infrastructure of the arts (the physical spaces) but also the joy energy and inspiration of those working in these jobs. Funding in ‘2028/29’ is no use if you have gone and got a job doing something else. And the danger is that you also lose a huge amount of experience wisdom and insight from the sector in this meltdown.

The tragic thing about all of this is that you literally have a showcase to the world every year and its a completely wasted opportunity.

Nor do the sums add up in terms of return of investment. These are false savings destroying not just an industry but a culture, our culture.

None of this is new. Heather Parry wrote, almost a year ago:

“In the era of streaming, and pirating, and retail monopolies and risk-averse capitalism, the payment for being an artist diminishes over and over. Meanwhile, the creative industries continue to generate great profit for the economy and constitute an incredible return on investment on what is, in the broader context, a tiny sum of money. The City of Berlin’s culture budget for 23/24 is about £840 million. The Creative Scotland annual grant-in-aid from the government, to cover the whole of the country, is only £63 million. In return, in the government’s own words: ‘Scotland’s creative industries contribute more than £5 billion to the Scottish economy every year.’

[you can subscribe to her Substack HERE].

She goes on: “Early this year, the Scottish government announced a 10% cut in the culture budget ; £6.6 million pounds that were set to come out of the already much diminished pot that supports the arts in Scotland. A quick response from the creative unions and the Campaign for the Arts forced a u-turn from the government—though they couched this in language of an “uplift”, when it was nothing of the sort; it was a return to the already massively underfunded original plan. But it turns out they never planned to do anything of the sort; eight months later and Creative Scotland still has not seen this promised £6.6 million, and Angus Robertson has now confirmed in writing that it will never appear. The Scottish Government have imposed a 10% budget cut by stealth, just two weeks before Regularly Funded Organisations are due to receive their quarterly payments, leaving Creative Scotland with no choice but to take the needed money from their National Lottery reserves, an action that can only happen once. Next time, there will be no reserves.”

Now there are no reserves.

Key institutions have been lost and more are to come. And people too who are like institutions in that they contain multitudes of knowledge and experience will be lost too.